A Startup Just Raised $1 Million In A Week To Create This Gadget That Tells You How To Sleep Better

Lisa Eadicicco, provided by

Published 8:16 am, Thursday, July 31, 2014

"Everyone sleeps."

It's as simple as that, says James Proud, the founder and CEO of Hello Inc., when asked about why his company decided to create the Sense sleep tracker.

The Sense blew past its Kickstarter goal to hit the $1 million mark in less than a week. Now, 9 days into its campaign, Hello Inc. has raised $1.4 million to fund the Sense.

"Most people don’t walk a lot every single day," Proud told Business Insider. "But everyone has to sleep every single day."

Sense is a sleep tracker that not only tells you how well you slept, but it also tries to provide insight as to how you can sleep better. Most fitness trackers, such as the Jawbone Up24 or Fitbit Flex, can tell you when you woke up during the night. But they can't tell you why — and that's the key problem Proud sought to solve.

"More importantly, it should be able to say why you slept a certain way," Proud told us. "Simply showing someone a graph of their sleep from the previous night is interesting, but it's not enough."

The Sense is a a small orb that sits in your bedroom and monitors the conditions around you. For example, if you woke up unexpectedly at 3 a.m., Sense would be able to tell you about a temperature drop, a loud noise, or some type of change that could have triggered your awakening.

The orb works with an accompanying Sleep Pill that sits under your pillow to detect how often you move, when you woke up, and other information about your sleeping patterns.

The Sense syncs with your smartphone to provide information about your sleeping habits. Through its accompanying app, you can view a timeline that maps out your sleep pattern from the previous night.

According to Proud, the timeline displays the conditions in your bedroom and what happened throughout the night above the duration of your sleep so you can correlate any disturbances with your sleeping pattern.

Ultimately, the goal from gathering this data is to be able to provide smart suggestions for Sense's users. For example, Sense could suggest you lower the temperature in your room or turn off the television as you're falling asleep if it recognizes a specific pattern.

"Your day is purely influenced by how you slept the previous night," Proud said. "How you function at work, how you function at school, how you eat, how you exercise, how you feel, is all depending on your previous night of sleep."

While Sense is impressive in its own right, it's bound to face increased competition as wearables and smart household appliances become more popular. Jawbone already announced in June that its fitness band now integrates with the Nest Learning Thermostat to automatically adjust the temperature depending on what you're doing.

What makes Sense different, however, is that you don't need to worry about pairing devices or remembering to wear something on your wrist.

"Technology is most valuable when you don’t have to think about it," Proud said. "That’s when it becomes magical."

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